Wayback Wednesday #8: 2007

I had so much fun reading, reminiscing, and writing about Broken and BMS last month, but it’s time to move on to other stories. For this week’s Wayback Wednesday, we’re going back to 2007, the year the most fun collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, 00Carter, was first published.

Title: 00Carter

Written: February 2007 – present(?)

Straightforward synopsis: In this action comedy inspired by and very loosely based on James Bond, Nick, Kevin, AJ, and Brian are secret agents, while Howie is a supervillain.

The story behind the story:
00Carter is a massive collaboration that was conceived on the Absolute Chaos community message board. I actually have a Danish plagiarist named Tanja to thank for 00Carter because, in a roundabout way, it was her plagiarizing fanfics from AC that brought my fellow collaborators and I together.

In 2006, Tanja stole a bunch of fanfics that had been written by other people and published on Absolute Chaos and reposted them under her own name on a message board called Refresh. She changed the characters’ names to convert them from BSB fanfics into Busted or McFly fanfics. (For those who may not know, Busted and McFly were both British boybands. I had never heard of either of them prior to this happening.) Other than that, the stories were word-for-word the same. Tanja had already been caught plagiarizing a bunch of stories from Dreamer’s Sanctuary, including Beside the Ocean, earlier that year, so I’d made it my mission to publicly shame this bitch and make sure everyone in the fanfic community knew she was a plagiarist. When she stole from Absolute Chaos, their moderators came on board and contacted the moderators at Refresh in hopes of having her banned or, at the very least, the plagiarized stories removed. The people over at Refresh were terribly unhelpful, which is what led to me starting a thread about it on the AC forum. You can read the full thread if you want to know how the plan to take down Tanja played out, but the important part for this blog is when we got off topic and started brainstorming for this story.

00Carter was the brainchild of my online bestie, Rose, whom I really only knew through Code Blue at that point in time. Replying to a joke I had made about us being undercover agents on Refresh, Rose said she had always wanted to write a James Bond-esque fic about Nick. “Carter… Nick Carter.” Another poster, Dee, and I joked about being “Carter girls” in her story, and the ideas started rolling. It was late at night (technically, very early in the morning), and we three night owls were the only ones online, so we completely hijacked the thread with this conversation. By the time we went to bed, Rose had recruited us both to collaborate on the story with her.

I was initially very reluctant to commit to writing something like this. It was way outside my comfort zone; I had never written anything in this genre before, and I had only seen one James Bond movie, The World is Not Enough, which I did not particularly enjoy or really even remember. Secret agents were not my thing. I was happy to help brainstorm, beta-read, make graphics and Flash videos, even design a website for the story… anything but actually write it. But Rose the Collab Whore can be very convincing, and she talked me into it. I had been writing almost nothing but my neverending Nick cancer story for almost four years at that point and knew I was going to be nearing the end of it soon. I had no idea what I was going to write next, but liked the idea of branching out and trying something totally different from my usual medical drama/romance – and 00Carter was definitely different.

One thing that I think worked well for 00Carter was the fact that very few of us were actually James Bond fans. I forced myself to watch a few more Bond movies in the early years of writing this story for inspiration, but I really didn’t need to. While we did do some research on characters in the James Bond universe as we came up with our characters and created roles for each of the Boys, we quickly branched out and made 00Carter our own. Although it appears to be a James Bond parody, it’s only loosely based on Bond and ends up spoofing a ton of other stuff that has nothing to do with 007: American Idol, Men in Black, The X-Files, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, Speed, Carmen Sandiego, Harry Potter, Home Alone, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, to name a few.

The day after that late night conversation, Rose started a new thread to continue planning 00Carter and recruit more writers for the project, and it’s there where you can see it really come together. I love that these threads still exist. When you’re writing a story by yourself, it’s easy to forget how exactly your ideas formed inside your head, but the fact that this was a collaboration that was conceived on a public message board makes it possible to see exactly who came up with what, when, and how. We eventually created a private Yahoo Group to continue planning and had a lot of group chats on Yahoo Messenger, but many of the initial ideas proposed in these two threads made it into the story. Nick as Agent 008, who prefers to be called 00Carter. Kevin as Agent K and AJ as Agent J, modeled after M and Q in James Bond. Brian as a CIA agent, The Rok. Howie as the supervillain Dr. Rough, like Dr. No. (Confession: I’ve always read his name as “Dr. Ruff” even though “Dr. Ro” makes way more sense.) All the less-popular boyband members being Dr. Rough’s minions in his terrorist organization, FANS. Justin Timberlake as a scorned agent-turned-villain. Lance Bass as Mr. Lancybassy, K’s secretary, inspired by M’s secretary Miss Moneypenny. The Carter girls we created as highly fictionalized versions of ourselves: Red Jewel (me), Professor Pearl (Rose), and Diamond Divine (Dee).

We started with a team of eleven writers, which, in hindsight, was probably way too many. The first episode, “Carter… Nick Carter,” was the only one written by all eleven of us, and it’s my least favorite because, beside the fact that it’s mostly character introductions and not much actually happens in it, all the different writing styles give it a disjointed feel. As we got further into the story, this problem solved itself: the less-committed writers dropped out, and those of us who were left learned from each other and created a more consistent style for the story, so the rest of the episodes flow better.

Rose and I modeled the way we did things after what had worked for Code Blue. We would get the whole team of writers together in a chat to plan each “episode,” and one of us would take all the ideas we agreed on and write an outline for the episode with a breakdown of each scene. That would be shared with the group, and then we’d all take turns claiming scenes to write. We each came to have favorite characters that we preferred to write about, and that helped with the consistency of how the characters are written.

Since Red Jewel was “my” character, I’ve written most, if not all of her parts, but my favorite character to write, hands down, is Dr. Rough. I’ve always loved villains, and he and the rest of FANS are so much fun to write. We took a lot of creative license with Howie, as he’s nothing like Howie at all, but that’s the fun of AU (alternate universe). His origin story is that he started out like the “Sweet D” we all know and love, but after being rejected by Himitsu Takana (the agency that is the 00Carter version of Bond’s MI6) because he was too short to qualify as an agent, he snapped and reemerged as a supervillain with a Napoleon complex. We took Howie’s possible real life insecurities – his height and the fact that he was relegated to a role as more of a “background” member of the Backstreet Boys who was never as popular as the others – and turned them into his motivation to take over the world and get revenge on HimTak.

Although Dr. Rough is named for Dr. No, we had to follow in the footsteps of Austin Powers and Inspector Gadget in spoofing the Bond villain Blofeld, who’s always shown stroking a white Persian cat. We gave Dr. Rough a pet of his own: a ferret named Dr. Twitches. He also has a moonwalking rockhopper penguin named MJ, short for Michael Jackson. We have plans to eventually introduce another animal minion, a platypus named Platypussy Galore. I wanted to share that with you in case we never actually get that far because the name alone is amazing. (I wish I could say I was the one who thought of it, but I don’t think I was.)

Howie’s right-hand man is Justin Timberlake, also known as “Drums,” which comes from an old joke based on his song “Like I Love You.” It’s no secret that I can’t stand Justin Timberlake and have taken every opportunity to make fun of him in my stories over the years. 00Carter is no exception. His back story is that he was once a part of Himitsu Takana, until a horrific injury ended his career as a secret agent. During a mission, he was doused in a chemical that caused his head to swell (because he’s big-headed, get it?) so suddenly and severely, his eyeball popped. Without twenty-twenty vision, he was no longer qualified to be an elite agent. After he left HimTak, he was recruited by Dr. Rough, who designed a robotic red eye for him and made him second-in-command over at FANS. Drums wears a metal headband to keep the robotic eye in place and speaks in ebonics. He also loses his right hand later in the story, when Nick slices it off with his sword in the pirate episode, and has it replaced by a hook and eventually a prosthetic hand. He’s a delight to write, too.

Donnie Wahlberg is my other favorite member of FANS to write, even though he’s about as far form the real Donnie Wahlberg as he could be. We based him 100% on his character from the beginning of The Sixth Sense, which was the only thing I had seen Donnie in at the time – this was years before NKOTBSB, and most of us were very young at the height of New Kids on the Block’s fame. So even though the real Donnie is like the charismatic “bad boy” of New Kids, our Donnie is a snivelling, shaking, twitching, little, rat-like dude. In fact, he reminds me of Peter Pettigrew/Wormtail from Harry Potter, and that is also who I’ve modeled him after in the parts I’ve written about him. (Likewise, Dr. Rough has become quite Voldemort-esque in the way he speaks to his minions.)

00Carter is one of the most fun, unique stories I’ve ever written, and it’s helped me grow so much as a writer. Before 00Carter, I wrote almost exclusively drama with romance on the side, sometimes suspense. It’s hard to categorize 00Carter into any one genre because it’s got a little of everything – comedy, drama, action, sci-fi… It’s unlike anything I had ever written before. I had to go way outside my comfort zone to research and write about things I never thought I would enjoy writing. In the episode “Bunnies in Black,” for example, I wrote a bloody alien baby birthing scene and a scene in which one of the Carter girls, posing as a Playboy bunny while undercover, has to give Hugh Hefner an enema, which I had to research for and imagine in my head in order to write. I had never written sci-fi or horror before that. Doing so has given me a lot more confidence in myself as a writer. I know I can research and write just about anything now, no matter how challenging. The challenge is what makes it fun!

Probably the most challenging episode I played a big part in planning and writing was “Catch Her If You Can,” in which we turned plagiarist Tanja into a Carmen Sandiego-esque villainess named Tanja Copenhagen who steals priceless historical texts from museums around the world and sends our heroes on a globetrotting mission to catch her and recover the stolen books. We had to come up with a series of encrypted clues for our characters to decode as they went on a worldwide treasure hunt, which required a ton of research into locations and texts. I also wrote a parody of the “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” theme song and made an interactive Flash “game” to go along with the episode, which was a ton of work but turned out so cool (at the time). It’ll be obsolete by the end of the year when Flash is no longer supported, which is so sad!

Every episode of 00Carter has parts I love, but I have two favorite episodes. One is “It’s a Small World,” the Disney episode. This episode features one of my favorite moments, which is when Nick’s singing “One Jump Ahead” from Aladdin as he’s being chased through the Magic Kingdom by FANS minions, and the minions start singing the crowd parts – “Vandal! Street rat! Scoundrel!” Veronica wrote that part, and it’s always cracked me up, to the point that I thought of it and smiled even as I watched the live action Aladdin last year. I wrote the chase through the “It’s a Small World” ride, where Dr. Rough has a mental breakdown (“It’s not small! I’m not small!”), which is a part I’m rather proud of. That required a lot of listening to that damn song and watching ride-through videos on YouTube, which was about as unpleasant as researching enemas.

My other favorite episode is “Wreckage in a Winter Wonderland,” the Olympics episode. We were on a time crunch with that one, trying to get it written and posted before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where the episode took place. Although we were not known for getting episodes written in a timely manner, especially later in the story, we pulled that one off, posting the episode as the Olympics were going on. This episode is noteworthy for finally including a scene of Nick drinking hot cocoa, “shaken, not stirred,” as Rose had envisioned in her original idea for the story. It also features an epic bobsled chase between Nick, Dr. Rough, and Drums, which was inspired by one of the few Bond movies I watched for this story, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But my favorite part is the Speed parody that takes place on a Zamboni at the figure skating rink which is rigged to explode if its speed drops below five miles per hour. I wrote all the Speed stuff, which was so much fun because of Mr. Lancybassy and the figure skating stuff (I love figure skating!). While researching for the Vancouver Olympics, we had also discovered and fallen in love with the mascots, especially Quatchi the Sasquatch and Miga the Snowbear, so it was fun to incorporate them into the storyline.

I love the last episode we posted, “A 00Carter Christmas,” too. It was meant to be a fun, little “special” episode to come in between the “real” episodes, but it took us a year and a half to finish because, by that point in time, our team of writers had dwindled to less than half of our original number. The core four or five of us who were left were not as committed as we had been in the beginning. We were writing other stories or moving on to other boybands or having kids or dealing with health problems or the loss of loved ones. I’ve found that the older I get, the more real life tends to interfere with my fanfic hobby, and it happened to my co-writers as well. We had intended to have the Christmas episode up for Christmas 2011, but we barely had it done in time to post for Christmas 2012, and we haven’t finished an episode since. That is sad, but if the Christmas episode is the last one we ever post for 00Carter, it’s a good one to go out on. It features two Christmas poem parodies, “Twelve Hours Before Christmas” and “How Dr. Rough Stole Christmas,” which, together, tell the story of Dr. Rough’s attempt to ruin Christmas by stealing everyone’s Christmas decorations, Grinch-style, and having his minions rob a New York City toy store, like in Home Alone II. The first half is told from the good guys’ perspective, while the second half is told from the bad guys’. It was a fun one to write, even if it did take forever.

It’s been seven years since we last updated 00Carter, and I’m not sure what the future holds for this story. We have two episodes in progress and many more planned, but it’s been years since anyone has written a part for it. I can’t speak for my co-writers, but I have a feeling that at this point, if anyone’s going to resurrect it, it would be up to Rose and me to do it by ourselves. We’ve both kept busy with other projects within the fandom, as well as real life obligations, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of us going back to 00Carter someday. Unlike Code Blue, I’m not ready to call 00Carter officially discontinued. I love this story and what it’s done for me. It’s made me a more creative, well-rounded writer who’s willing to take risks and step outside her comfort zone. I don’t know that I would have been able to write something like The Pandaskunk Saga without the experience 00Carter gave me at weaving together seemingly random ideas and somehow making them work.  00Carter also introduced me to friends I may never gotten to know otherwise. Rose and I became close through this collaboration, and she’s still my best friend in the fandom and favorite co-writer.

I wish other people loved 00Carter as much as we do, but it’s never had much of a following. To be honest, it’s not a story I probably ever would have clicked on to read if I wasn’t writing it because of the whole not liking James Bond thing, so I get it. That may be another reason why we weren’t more motivated to keep plugging away after a certain point; it’s not like we had anyone begging us to update. But I write because I love it, first and foremost, and even if Rose and I only ever continue writing for each other’s entertainment, it would be worth it to see this story updated again. I hope it will happen someday!